LITTLE ROCK (AP) — Ernie Passailaigue’s greatest accomplishment as the first director of Arkansas’ lottery was starting the games from scratch. Now the lottery commission needs to find someone to get beyond the first step of selling tickets.

Passailaigue earned praise for his quick launch of the lottery, which sold its first tickets three months after he was hired. But the criticism he received over the games’ management — from the high salaries he and others received to problems uncovered by a legislative audit — drowned out that feat by the time he resigned last week.

It’s an ending that Passailaigue had hinted at almost from the beginning.

“If I can’t deliver what I say I’m going to deliver, based on my plan, I guess I’ll have to go back to South Carolina,” Passailaigue told legislators shortly after he was hired in 2009. “I’m willing to stake my reputation on getting this job done and getting it successful, the way I’ve envisioned it.”

Passailaigue delivered on his vision to start lottery sales quickly and begin raising money for college scholarships. It allowed the state to award more than 60,000 college scholarships funded by the lottery, but there was little time to savor that good news, with a steady stream of missteps and problems within the lottery rankling lawmakers and the public.

“It seemed like it was always something or another coming up,” Senate President Paul Bookout said.

From repairing the lottery’s image after Passailaigue’s exit to improving lottery ticket sales after a disappointing start to the year, the next chief executive of the lottery faces an overwhelming list of challenges.

“I think now it is time for somebody to take over who would be able to do this not in a startup mode anymore,” said Dianne Lamberth, chairwoman of the Arkansas Lottery Commission.

The top item on the to-do list for the next lottery director will be improving the games’ revenues. Passailaigue was criticized this year over the lottery’s profits coming in almost $11 million short of projections for the fiscal year that ended June 30. Passailaigue has projected that the games this year will raise more than $102 million for scholarships this fiscal year, but the lottery is already more than $732,000 off that figure in the first two months of this budget year.

Before his resignation was announced, Passailaigue said a major concern for the lottery is the mix of ticket sales. Customers are buying more scratch-off tickets and fewer draw-game tickets than the lottery has predicted, a figure that is hurting lottery revenues.

“We’ve got to get people playing the online games,” Passailaigue told the lottery commission.

The next director also faces an lottery organization that some lawmakers say needs a major overhaul. They point to the nearly $100,000 in penalties and interest levied on the lottery by the Internal Revenue Service, and a series of problems uncovered by legislative auditors last year. The lottery is appealing the IRS penalties for late deposits and officials with the games say they’ve corrected many of the problems found by auditors.

Beebe, who appoints three of the commission’s members, said a new director will give the lottery a chance to correct the problems that came up under Passailaigue’s tenure.

“I think it needs to be an administrator who can communicate with the Legislature and the legislative oversight committee, someone who can manage,” Beebe said. “You don’t have the issue of having someone to start it up, but you’d like to have someone with some degree of experience in this arena.”

The next big fight will be where the commission will look for a replacement. Lamberth said she prefers a national and statewide search, but some legislators have said they’d like the panel to look for a replacement within the state.

“I don’t think the Commission should rule out any qualified candidate, but I believe we have some talented, highly capable folks right here at home,” House Speaker Robert Moore said last week. “Obviously, I think it’s important that the next director knows what it takes to ensure the lottery produces needed scholarship revenue, but the position also needs someone who understands the state and will continue to uphold the integrity of the institution,”

Former Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, who championed the lottery and the amendment that created it, has said the lottery needs to avoid turning the search into a political process.

“It’s a place for a focus on finding the best person to run the lottery and not the place for political cronyism or certainly not the next job for a political has-been,” Halter said.

“We’ve been under scrutiny from day one,” Lamberth said. “There’s going to be scrutiny until there is no lottery, as far as I’m concerned.”

Andrew DeMillo has covered Arkansas government and politics since 2005. He can be reached at www.twitter.com/ademillo